Caspers World in Miniature was a theme park in Victoria, Australia, a bit over half way between Adelaide and Melbourne. I don’t have a definitive source, but I believe it opened in 1976. My one and only visit to Caspers was in 2008, to break up that same, long drive. It’s taken me that much time to come to terms with what we found there.

Despite looking like it, The World in Miniature wasn’t abandoned. The owners still lived out front and we paid to enter. However, it was empty. Outdated exhibitions on unloved grounds. Our detour seemed destined to be a disappointment.

Then we got to the basement of the pyramid, and that’s where we found all the human teeth.

And that’s just the start.

If you'd like to read the full story, head over to Medium!

(Yes, readers, I am trying a new publishing platform for stories I think might be of wider interest).

I feel like - at this point in my life - I have gotten the hang of winter, and this year I haven’t overreacted about how fucking cold and miserable it is. By age 33 I’ve learnt about base layers and insulation, and from the end of May I pack away all my dri-fit shorts and hang out my four pairs of Merino socks to rotate through each day with infrequent washes until ducklings.

I keep the blinds open during the day to let the sunlight in, then close them when I get home in the evenings to check on the slow cooker. There’s linen sheets on the bed, oats in my belly. I’ve taken charge of winter. The above-average temperatures, and half the usual rainfall has nothing to do with my dominance.

While I have been killing it, and never complained once about how it’s dark from 5pm and the sunlit time only increases in length by like twenty seconds each day for weeks, one area I haven’t quite hit five-stars in the metrics is tracksuit pants. While outside the house I am generally toasty and not being whipped by Antarctic winds which are specifically targeting the face that often, inside the house I’m still wearing a pair of tracksuit pants I bought in 2008. And they were specifically the same model as the much-loved pair I’d lost and needed to replace. What amazing advances in tracksuit pant technology over the past decade had I been missing out on?

With some overtime pay in my pocket, I set out to ask the sportswear sales assistants of Adelaide, “What is the best, most technologically advanced pair of tracksuit pants you’ve got?” And this is what I found out.

If you haven’t really thought about trackpants technology recently, I will provide a brief summary of this complicated science. The goal of a good pair of tracksuit pants is to be soft and flexible, while also being restrictive enough to trap the warm air from your body within the pant legs.

The first component of this leg warming is achieved through the material of the pants.

The first pair I tried were the Adidas Tech Sweatpant, which were soft to the touch, and had the word tech in their name. I had high hopes. Their tag claimed they were a 59% polyester / 41% cotton knit. That was awfully specific, I thought. It must be the peak level of tracksuit pant material technology. Forget rounding to a whole number and calling it a day, Adidas tracksuit scientists had clearly tried every possible permutation of polyester and cotton and this is what they came up with. I carried a large pair into the changeroom, and this is what I found.

The second component of leg warming, the fit of the garment.

In the promo shot, some model with literally no calves gives the impression these pants will hang comfortably from knee to ankle. After squeezing my hoofers through the leg-holes it became apparent what I’d missed out on in tracksuit pants’ evolution since 2008. We were now doing slim fit.

This shook me a little. Surely they couldn’t all be like this. For those unaware, the closer the pant clings to the leg, the tighter the seal at the ankle, the more heat the pants will trap. But this was unreasonable. What if you wanted warm legs, but also wanted to walk up stairs? I passed the pants back to the salesperson and left.

Day Two
I still hadn’t spent that overtime pay. I visited the Nike store, went up several flights of stairs. That had to be a good sign, I thought. What cruel fate would put the tracksuit pants at the top of three flights of stairs if you couldn’t walk up the stairs wearing them.

That’s a little snug.

Despite what the salesperson tried to tell me, the Nike pants were almost identical to the Adidas pants, except with a swoosh instead of stripes.
Although, I did like how the Nike tracksuit pant scientists had engineered a shell of non-absorbent polyester into the lap of the pants.

Those tracksuit scientists clearly knew that users would be eating big bowls of stir fry on the couch in these units.

Week Four
A few weeks passed before I had the resolve to again try to find the pair of track pants I deserved. The first thing I noticed upon walking into the sportswear store is that, by this point in July, the tracksuit pant choices were running low. And, the styles which remained were stocked only in the odd sizes of XXL and XXXS. (Yes, I do appreciate the irony of calling out odd sizes while carrying around calves the size of footballs).
I had no idea that tracksuit pants had seasons, and that the sportswear store was probably clearing shelf space preparing for their dri-fit shorts sale to sell to every sucker who gets excited about ducklings.

Among the dregs on the clearance rack I found a pair in a colour I probably wouldn’t have chosen, and was immediately excited by the “Relaxed Fit” wording on the tag. With material as soft as down, I slipped them on and stood.

My first thought was, for a relaxed fit, they looked almost too formal.

While they did cling to my lower legs a little, I could stand and sit and bend. Outside the wind howled, and I just knew that my house would smell like wet dog that night, so I figured seeing I was handling winter with such little complaint that I would buy these pants and call my quest complete.

They were also the only pair left in a Large.

The sportswear sales assistants of Adelaide were relieved.

Speculate was the inaugural Speculative Fiction Writers festival, held in South Melbourne on a clear, chilly autumn Saturday.

A great assortment of authors, scholars and others from the writing community shared their wisdom and experiences, too much for me to summarise in a review. Instead, I thought I'd share a single takeaway and challenge from each of the sessions:

Session 1 - The Once and Future Fantasy.

The opening session of the day spoke about the realm of fantasy, from origins to now.
On the topic of tropes, and Tolkien’s influence on the fantasy genre, the panel discussed how Tolkien’s races were inspired by his desire to create a mythology for England at the time of his writing.
Similarly, superheroes like Spiderman and Captain America were born out of cultural fears of their era, like radiation, and Nazis.
Challenge: If you feel like there are no original characters left, look at what's in the public consciousness now. What defines contemporary times? What are people afraid of? Leverage that.

 

Session 2 - The Language of Imagination.

Hair is 90% of your selfie, proclaimed a salon’s curbside chalkboard that I passed on the way to Speculate. It's also the first thing 90% of writers use to describe their characters, according to the second panel. Alison Arnold argued that the less you show of a character, the more the reader can invest with their own imagination.
Challenge: While there was debate about how much, or little, of a character's demographics and appearance should be described, the request was made to rely less on hair.

 

Session 3 - Science Fiction: The Past, the Present, and What's to Come.

The rapid pace of technological change (in contrast to the slow speed of the traditional publishing process) means speculative fiction at the time of writing might be out of date by the time it's written.
Aurealis co-editor Dirk Strasser listed some 2018 trends in the science fiction genre: Cli-Fi, social-issues space-opera, generation ships, and gender identity.
Before taking this as a challenge to cram all those plots into a single story, consider
Sean McMullen’s monologue about how all future trends had been done before, and even the ideas we think are modern were technically possible decades earlier.
Challenge: Go back to the past - the conflicts, struggles and characters of yesteryear - to find fresh inspiration for the future. Time is cyclical anyway.

 

Session 4 - Dungeons & Development: Character Under Pressure.

The post-lunch session gave me chills, because of the live string section who knew just the right moment of the roleplaying display to fade in with a long note from a violin.
The Dungeons and Dragons scenario was part narrative, part improv, and highlighted the importance of giving characters three dimensions, and the ability to make mistakes.
Challenge: Write characters strong and deep enough to mess up, and then recover. What the author knows is the wrong decision might seem like genius to the character, and stimulate new, unexpected conflict.

 

Session 5 - Setting: Colouring the Pages.

The final session. Four seated authors, illuminated under the warm spotlights of the dark theatre, spoke to setting and its importance.
Setting is non-negotiable, its the world the author delivers to the reader, and without it the tale loses its authenticness.
Alison Goodman spoke about aesthetic cohesion, that the setting should be in service of characters, to bring out the best in them, or test them in the most interesting ways.
Challenge: Identify in your work were setting and character are adjacent, but not touching. For example, instead of “It was cold,” it could be “The freezing air stung her cheeks.” Or, “the blizzard concealed her attackers from view, they circled each other, footsteps in the field disappearing under fresh powder as quick as they were spotted.”

Did I mention that Melbourne was chilly?

What do Steve Smith, Barnaby Joyce, Harvey Weinstein and Martha Stewart all have in common?

Like so many other celebrities, politicians, business-people and app developers, they don't think the rules should apply to them.

The farcical level of disrepute the Australian cricket team brought to their sport today was yet another example of arrogant humans in a position of power or superiority choosing to believe they are above the law.
In this absurd case, only the laws of cricket, but it simply highlights the recurring theme that human beings will always try to find ways to cheat to benefit themselves.
Whether it be trying to win a game, trying to make money, trying to get sex, trying to take power, nothing changes. We establish rules for ourselves, then we break them.
It's not only those in power. You probably break rules too. Pirating software, using a phone while driving, printing personal documents on the office printer, self-scanning expensive produce for lower prices, overestimating work-related expenses on your tax return.
Not everyone, of course, but enough for a pattern to emerge.
Human beings are cheaters, it's biological. We wouldn't be where we are without pushing the boundaries. The first fish to walk on land was breaking the rules. How did mammoths feel when we cheated and used stone tools? How many steps forward has our species taken by trying to gain an unfair advantage?
It doesn't excuse the modern day cheats, they should know better. We all should, but the justifications they made would be like the ones in everyone else's head when we break the rules. Psychological camouflage for what's really happening under the hood. The only thing between you and what you want is an abstract concept and a perceptible risk.

So should we just cheat? Everyone drop the act, step back to survival of the fittest?
It depends how much longer we want to survive on this planet. The evolutions of our technology has outpaced our own. We wield power beyond what our meaty brains can holistically understand.
Funnily enough, we're actually heading in the right direction. Every time corruption or deception generates public attention, it indicates we're coming closer to self-governance. It might seem slow, or overwhelming, but it's happening.
Of course, the better we govern ourselves, the more innovative cheaters will become. We've seen that this week too, regarding revelations about Cambridge Analytica, and the evidence of flaws in our social media platforms.
My preference would be for a global AI to take charge, but I don't think we've progressed to that stage yet. It would probably turn on us, or never get out of beta while project costs spiral higher. More likely, it will be hit with security flaws, or someone will find loopholes.
Sadly, that's what we do.

When it comes to businesses on social media, A 2013 investigation estimated every like has a value somewhere between $214 and zero.

TL;DR - It's probably zero, as most of the time users who like a business are already customers.

So, do likes help create sales? Probably not, according to Harvard Business Review, whose article clearly demonstrates a lot more research into the topic than what I did while on the couch today. Under proper controls, sales don’t show much change between those who have and have not liked a page.

Yet, my new year’s resolution for 2018 is to like more stuff on the internet.

The internet of today is different to the one I grew up on. Back in the day, posting of personal information, things like surnames and photos, felt about as natural as giving out your home address to strangers on the night bus.
Something changed over the years, and that something was Facebook. Since 2007, social media, and phones with cameras have completely flipped the way humanity interacts with the internet. Millions of people who had never heard the connecting sounds of a dial up modem began to flood the internet with pictures of their face, their food, their pets. Other things...

Liking things, with a Twitter heart or a Facebook reaction or Instagram love is another form of sharing personal information. Almost always, a face and a name gets included in those interactions. It's for this reason my old web instincts have prevented me from trigger happy like-clicking. From 2018, that's changed.

Why? Whether you like it or not, the likes of you and your connections define the viewpoint of what you see on social media. The algorithms behind your newsfeed filter and tweak to deliver content based on likes. This means that failing to like and share the things you think are funny or important can lead to things you don't think are funny or important taking priority on the newsfeed of your contacts, and falling out of prominence entirely.

Liking things is also a great way to support content creators and connect them to a wider audience. It might not lead to sales - sharing and word of mouth is better for that - but it can help a little with extending exposure. And thumbs up, hearts, and most of the other emojis are like little forms of encouragement too.

It’s not only content creators that get happy feelings from seeing likes. Everyone does! In 2018, the time of pretending we’re not influenced by social media’s algorithms is finished. Of course we all want likes and upvotes and validation. A society where social media rankings determine our self worth and employment opportunities is still a long way off, so we should revel in this segment of the twenty-first century where sending a positive vibe to someone anywhere in the world is as simple as clicking a mouse button or pressing a thumb down on the glass of a phone screen. Be a light in the darkness. Shape or disrupt the echo chambers you’re stepping into every day. Like things, because the opposite is not liking anything, and who wants to do that?

P.S. You may notice that I don’t embed social media widgets on my website, because my old school thinking is still that we shouldn’t tell Facebook and Twitter Analytics all the pages we visit. If you want to follow Bradism.com on social media, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook and, occasionally, Instagram.

I’m standing, waiting in a crowd at a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign in the city. On the other side of the road I need to go right, but there’s going to be people crossing beside me who will force me to slow down. That’s when I spot the traffic-light post on the opposite side of the street. It makes eye-contact back and lifts up a fist. The pick is set.

Welcome to the first entry in a series about the mundane things that I do incredibly well.

My journal is a place to celebrate things I’m good at in life, but none of my abilities are what are traditionally thought of as great or noteworthy. I won’t be winning critical awards, recognition for technical expertise within my industry, or athletic gold medals. But, there are little things in life which offer their own opportunities for excellence. Things you probably already practice every day, without realising it’s something you might be capable of being incredibly good at.

Today’s topic, fast walking.... Which I guess actually is an Olympic sport, but anyway...

One of the things people tell me whenever we walk somewhere together for the first time is, “Brad, you walk so fast.” Often they will make reference to my long legs, as if that explains everything. Long legs are helpful for fast walking, but they’re not required. There are other techniques and strategies that even the stubbiest legged person can use. What distinguishes a great fast walker is not their legs, but their head.

Before we talk about how to walk fast, let’s reflect on why we want to. Walking fast has so many benefits in daily life:

• You move between places quicker. That could mean an extra thirty seconds of sleep in the morning, or the ability to reach a far away shop and get back to your desk without exceeding the length of your lunch break.
  
• It burn more calories
  
• You can look important and busy
  
• It’s easier to escape awkward social interactions, and chuggers
  

I keep an eye on the road’s traffic lights, and when they turn amber I am primed for my own light to change to green. I step off the curb, already angling my shoulders slightly right to cross the road on the hypotenuse.

Beside me a man is also striding briskly, and he’s on my right. Locomotion and reflexes are core facets of fast walking, but they’re not unique, so he and I are evenly matched. If I want to continue minimising the distance travelled to go left once I’m over the road I will have to either cut him off, which would be impolite, or I need to slow down a step to cut behind him.

That would be if I hadn’t already lined myself up with the traffic light pole before I started crossing. When we reach the opposite curb our trajectories are taking my shoulder right past the pole, and the man’s path straight into it. I slide past the screen and into open footpath, alone. A demonstration of good versus great fast walking has just been given to those still ambling halfway across the crossing. I don’t see the man again.

Using inanimate objects as screens isn’t the only benefit a basketball background brings to fast walking. At its essence, a skilled fast walker is not so good at moving fast as they are at moving smoothly. Anyone can hustle uncontrollably towards a destination, just hang out by the train station in the afternoon peak hour and see. There will always be obstacles, both stationary and moving, between your feet and where you want to go. The ability to pivot, move laterally, and euro-step as appropriate will be the difference between getting to your location quickly, and walking up the back of an old woman with a walking frame accidentally. The most important thing is feeling in control of your movement. If you don’t feel confident, you will not hit your top speed, and a truly great fast walker will soon overtake you.

Sometimes, while walking fast in a sea of slow walkers, it’s possible to become self conscious about the gait or bob your pace brings with it. Any hesitation caused by this image management will slow you down. A true fast walker must block out all negative thoughts. A good pair of black sunglasses and/or some noise cancelling headphones playing something upbeat will solve that problem.

2011. I had a bread addiction.

When the psychiatrist asked me to think of situations that triggered my behaviour, I answered Woolworths bakery, close to the end of the day.

He showed me an inkblot, symmetrical and jagged, like the crossbones of a roadkill Jolly Roger.
"What do you see?" he said.
"A Mocha Hot Cross Bun."

Flashbacks from six years ago. My last relapse, sucking down a six-pack a day. Buying a dozen with the intent of freezing buns that were never frozen.

I thought it was all behind me, that my penchant for those delicious, sweet bread-sacks of wheat, chocolate and coffee had gone stale. After all, Jesus had risen, Woolworths stopped selling them, and in the years that followed I never even felt the urge to eat them again.

Then, in 2017, I saw the sticker.

Not just that sticker, but the other sticker too.

Later I would discover Woolworths stopped making them after 2011. I guess those piles of packs marked down for clearance were because the bakers shared my lack of impulse control. For whatever reason, six years later, they decided to bring them back.
Mocha Hot Cross Buns - The Resurrection.

I'll just buy a packet and eat them for the sake of a journal entry, my brain lied. It wasn't really my thoughts. It was the voice. The whispering of addiction. Would I be foolish enough to break bread with that monkey on my back? The voice told me it would be okay. The voice told me one wouldn't hurt.
"I don't think so," I told the voice.

We got home from food shopping. The buns were on the top of the bag. Adding them to my trolley, putting the self-service checkout on mute, using a 5.25% discounted Woolwoths E-Gift Card at the register, ignoring the checkout assistant, stealing a pump of her hand sanitiser as I left. I didn't remember any of this. The voice had whispered in my ear the whole time, keeping me complicit.

It was debatably morning tea time. I unwrapped the plastic and pulled one free, placing it in the microwave on a sheet of paper towel. It was almost all muscle memory. The 10sec button once, the 1sec button seven times. Too long and it would burn me. Too short and it would maintain too much structural integrity. Seventeen seconds The perfect amount of microwaving to bring the bun to that ideal penumbra between food and delicious, chocolatey nourishment goo. I slurped it down, deaf to the world and the feelings of guilt and shame and regret. There was only thing I could think of.

"More," said the voice. Mocking me. It was back. "You forgot to take a photo. Eat another one."

I tried to recall the 12 Step Program and I heard the voice say, "Two more six packs."

By lunchtime the packet was down to 2. In a sudden moment of clarity I considered flushing the rest down the toilet, but that joke was only funny when I was renting. I felt anger, confusion and, according to the voice, hunger.

Worse, I hadn't even thought of a single good thought to journal about my relapse.

"Relax," said the voice. "You have until April 16."

I stared at the remaining two buns, slick with doughy-sweat on the inside of the packet. The bread tie all that separated me from another backwards step. And I replied to the voice, "No."

No. I was not the same person I was in 2011. My base metabolic rate was 40 calories per day higher then. Also I have a wife and a dog now.

The voice said something, I couldn't make it out. It's strength was crumbling.

Those two buns sat in the pantry for another seven days, waiting for me to falter. I never faltered.

At the end of the week they were weak, drying. They still looked edible.
"Eat them," the voice begged as I opened the garbage bin. "The flavour, the texture, the fuzzy feeling in the brain. Eat them."

"Who are you talking to right now?" I said. "Who is it you think you see? You clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in. You are not the flavour, bread. I am the flavour! A guy opens his door and gets crossed and you think that of me? No...

I am the one who mochs."

A polite panic hung over the cubicles of Level 19. There was a shortage of paper towel in the office. Trilling phones made people jump. As the days went on and it became clear that the stocks would not be replenished, the intensity and overall blood pressure of the collective spiralled higher. No one could have predicted the carnage that the omission of such a simple staple would bring.
Handy towels - extra absorbent - were a necessity of office life. Their firm, flexible presence was what held the very fabric of our habitat together (stronger when wet). We used them ubiquitously, as coasters for our coffee; towels to dry our hands; wipes to clean away the sauce of our lunch or the juice from our apples from the surfaces of our desks. It was policy, the note taped to the microwave proclaimed, that reheated meals must be covered by them. And afterwards, when we rinsed our Tupperware and avoided the long since laundered tea towels it was their paper brothers we turned to for drying.

While the shortage persisted mornings became unbearable. Coffee mugs with yesterday's stains couldn't be refilled with instant coffee mix, making procrastination harder. Boxes of donuts, supplied every Monday and Friday, were eyed wistfully. Tempting, but with nothing we could hold them with, nor to wipe our mouths on after.

The rumours spoke of an issue between management and the supplier. It was a rumour only; there had been no official correspondence distributed under company logos on the official email template. Not one executive seemed to appreciate the growing worries. Paper towels were what separated us from the blue collar. What they would treat as indulgence or admire with novelty we bourgeoisie took for granted. When they ate their sandwiches they'd sweep the crumbs to the floor. After our baguettes we would shepherd the crumbs and loose shreds of romaine lettuce onto the canvas of paper towel and deposit it into our individual waste baskets. That was what made us upper class.

By the fifth day things had gotten desperate. Stocks were dwindling. Every cupboard of every kitchenette was barren. In the bathrooms disgruntled lines formed to use the gimpy blow drier and its lazy, gentle breeze. Mike, one of the Service Support technicians, was microwaving the rest of last night's stir fry under the cover of a network access request form. You could tell who had half a roll left in their desks by those who had keyboards and monitors with no dust.

After eight days you couldn't pass a water cooler without overhearing the discussions on why we didn't go out and buy our own towels. It was principle, mainly.
'Why should we buy our own towels when they used to supply them?' Martha asked. Martha was now banned from the Nandos in the plaza downstairs. She'd tried to take more than her allocation of napkins, been refused and ended up slapping a junior manager who didn't hesitate to invoke his junior authority.
'And now my photo's on the wall there!' she said.
We all had excuses: inflation, taxes, Porter's Five Forces model. In the end we didn't need to justify our action. It was our right to have paper towels provided for us.

Jon Wu developed a sniffle as the season changed. After two days of blowing his noise on the recycled toilet paper, he resigned. He did not serve his two weeks and forewent payouts.
By the third Friday, when the donuts arrived, they were placed by the still unfinished box from Monday. A sorrowful gathering began in the kitchenette to gaze at them and murmur discontentedly. Finally, Taylor, one of the apprentices who always had whispers about him, stepped forward with youthful impetuosity and selected a sugar powdered pastry. We observed silently as he raised it towards his teeth. Three, four, five bites were made. It was all but gone. Strawberry filling leaked and grains of sugar left their legacy on his fingers like sandy feet leaving the seaside.
Taylor looked around nervously, examining each of our blank faces. With no support he licked each of his fingers clean then tried to wave them dry in the air. The last time we ever saw him was his surrender; he wiped his hands down the back of his pin-stripe pants and left the kitchenette sullenly, never to be seen again.

The whispers about Taylor ended that day, but another series started.
'Rose,' Marcus passed on, 'she has towels stockpiled at her desk. Stacks of them!'

At a quarter to eleven that morning Rose moved to the ladies room. Marcus was keeping lookout, and he signalled to us all. We stormed Rose's cubicle, turning over stacks of files, knocking over ornaments and pulling out drawers.
'There!'
We all stopped, gazing in glee at the pyramid of rolls Rose had in the bottom of her drawer. Hands flew, plastic wrapping was ripped and we gorged on paper towels. Some went to their desks to clean up crumbs or mug rings and flakes of dead skin and hair. Most ran straight to the kitchenette, grabbing donuts, gloving them in paper and relishing their messy sweetness. Each took joy in the simple act of wiping the crumbs and glazing from their lips and cheeks.
Rose stopped walking as she passed us returning from the bathroom. We froze. Nothing was said. We all stared at her staring at us. She closed her gaping mouth and walked away.

'She'd bought them herself' said Marcus the next morning, as in the background Rose placed a shoeprint marked photo of two grand children into her box of belongings. 'Herself, with her own money.'
Normally when someone left there would be a celebration and we would all say goodbyes and get cake. In this climate that wasn't possible. Also, Rose did not say goodbye.

After Rose left we all became more defensive. It was no longer our office without paper towels, it was every deprived individual for him or herself.
Dale was acting suspiciously. First he went into the janitor bay and returned with an aluminium bucket filled with water. Then from the mailroom he pilfered six mail trays. Finally, he emerged from the kitchenette brandishing the sharpest looking bread knife that wasn't in the dishwasher at the time.
Dale had two Golden Pothos shrubs in pots by his workstation. The idea to reduce the level of carbon monoxide and formaldehyde in the recycled air above his desk had come from the weekly health email he distracted himself with every Tuesday. The idea to pulp them into paper towels was his alone. Carefully Dale pruned the tiny trees, binning leaves and shredding stems into the bucket. During the Thursday amalgamation meeting he brought with him a branch and meticulously filleted flakes into a pile until there were no further issues. The NRE team in Malaysia made a complaint to VOIP technical support that during Friday's teleconference there was a reoccurring background noise on the line that sounded like sloshing. By the time we left for the bar, at a quarter to five on Friday afternoon, we glared shiftily at mailbox sized sheets of freshly pulped paper being hung to set on Dale's notice board, drying slowly in the glow of his monitor.

On Monday morning our weekends were absorbed into office reality and we came across destruction. The bucket was tipped over. The mail trays lay cracked and broken. Those miscarried towels had been stomped into the ground.
The message was clear: If all of us couldn't have paper towels, no one could.

Dale did not quit. However he did relocate to Laura's cubicle to avoid a carpet that smelled of tree sap and mildew. Laura did quit. She had a family and the sight of office sabotage had been an overwhelmingly stressful beginning to another week.

Without coffee, napkins, clean desks or dry hands what was once a picturesque office plan took on a more dishevelled appearance. Where a reduction in snacking and hallway chatter had been good for production initially, things were now taking a turn for the worse. Kai was called upstairs to talk about the leaving clients. Kai was the floor manager. He'd received this position after Ken, the old floor manager, resigned because he loved spaghetti bolognaise but only owned white shirts.

Despite the isolation being cultivated on Level 19 Kai did speak to Dale after the meeting. Kai sat next to Laura's old desk.
'They have them, the managers' he whispered.
'Paper towels,' said Dale. 'You saw them?'
'Well, no. I didn't see them. But their monitors aren't dusty, their donut box was empty and I heard their microwave running.'
Dale nodded to himself. The two went to Warren's cubicle. What was once a prized, multi-viewed corner location was now a fortress. Behind an upturned desk Warren crouched, hiding shirtless with his laptop replying to emails. Discarded behind him was a cotton-polyester button up with French cuffs doused in grease and glass cleaner.
'It ends now,' said Dale.
Warren stood up, brushing carpet fluff from his pants. The three walked the cubicles like wardens, extracting recruits.

That afternoon the crowd gathered in the lobby where the lifts were locked. Warren produced his access key and the army moved away and up the stairs. As they emerged in the reception of Level 20, Jane, the switchboard operator who had not been able to reapply make-up in three weeks, buzzed them through.

Upper Management was not a crowded space until filled with us vainqueurs. Quickly we clamoured through the heavy door frame and onto the more luxuriously carpeted floor between the wider partitions of Level 20.
'You can't be in here!' said a startled Frank, Asia Pacific Service Executive.
Before we could outlay our demands, Elliot - a forty-three year veteran of the accounting team - swung the keyboard he'd carried upstairs into Frank's neatly shaved face. Blood and NumPad keys sprayed through the air. Unprepared and aghast, we watched in slow motion Frank's buckling knees and his slump to the floor. There was silence. Elliot pointed at Frank's hand. His grip fell apart as he slipped into unconsciousness. From between his fingers the clutched paper towel unrumpled and rolled onto the carpet.
The scene became one of action. Rob, who signed our Christmas bonus letters, peered out from his office and performed a startled yelp. Dave B and Dave M from IT showered him with a volley of hubs and line filters. He cowered behind the water cooler and surrendered. The Daves tangled him in Ethernet cable and buried a wireless mouse between his teeth.
Alexi, from the print room, was pummelling our financial director with ink cartridges. Warren and Kai shepherded the rest of the executives towards the boardroom, brandishing telephone handsets like lassoes.

Dale stood and watched as the door was blocked shut, then walked to the manager's kitchen. There, on the shelf above the microwave, stood three rolls of paper towels. He clutched them to his chest and carried them back. They were thrown into the air to the sounds of cheers.

Mary, the CEO, was taken from the other managers and dragged to the copy room by Alexi. We laid her down across the bench. Her eyes darted around, her face confused yet still. Her neck rested on the paper guillotine. Though her vein pulsed she seemed to accept her destiny. Her eyes resting on Dale's hands and the paper towels he held, ready to wipe up spills.

Assignats is a short story I wrote in the spring of 2007. It was the first story I ever submitted to a real-life publication and the source of my first rejection slip. I always planned to improve it to the extent that one day its submission would lead to an acceptance slip, so I never posted it online. Hindsight has shown me that people aren't ready for the fantasy-office life genre. Also, I realised that brilliance wasn't inherited. I published this old story on bradism.com as a symbolic gesture to remind me that a rejection slip is actually quite high on the list of rewards that come from writing.